Amelie continued to advance with steady, relentless steps. And this time Magnus backed up. Just a little. “I am her maker,” he said. “And she must obey my commands.”

“Think you so?” Oliver sounded viciously amused. “Try.”

Claire pulled herself into a tighter ball. This is bad, she thought. Really bad. I need to get out of here. Being in the middle of this was like being caught in a swarm of hornets, but despite the panic tearing at her, she knew that if she tried to get up, tried to run, Magnus would kill her instantly.

Or Amelie would.

Magnus had forgotten all about her, his focus now on the new master draug before him. “Stop,” he said. “I am your maker. I command you to stop.”

Something happened, deep inside that thing … the inner dark shadow seemed to thrash, come into focus, and then that was Amelie, looking out of the draug. The real Amelie. Her eyes. Her anger. She wasn’t gone after all. Not completely.

She said, “I am a queen. I take no orders.” She plunged the silver knife deep into Magnus, punching through the slimy shell. He gave a horrible metallic screech as Amelie dropped the knife and reached into his broken shell with her bare, pale hands.

“No one,” she said, almost in a whisper, “commands me in Morganville. I command you. I command you to be still.”

His mouth stayed open, but the sound just … stopped. He wasn’t fighting her. It was as if he couldn’t. This, Claire remembered, was Amelie’s terrifying gift. She could compel vampires.

And now she could compel draug.

In that awful ringing silence, Claire heard the queasy squishing sound of Amelie’s hands pulling out of Magnus’s body. Something thrashed in her hands, alive and covered in suckers, mouths, teeth, something horrible dragged up out of the depths of the ocean where monsters lived.

The real form of a master draug, stripped of all its defenses.

Amelie crushed it. It made a wet sound, like a sponge being wrung out, and then there was a sudden, glassy snap.

Magnus’s shell collapsed, and the thick, murky fluid that inhabited it flooded out in a sticky, stinking rush to the thick old carpets. Claire scrambled up to a sitting position and crawled away from the mess, retching.

Amelie turned to Oliver and gave him that awful draug smile, full of death. “Now,” she said, “now it is mine. All of Morganville. All of you.”

“Not quite,” he said. He sounded far too calm, Claire thought, for someone who was about to be horribly killed by something as beautiful and terrible as Amelie was now. “Your transformation isn’t complete. You never made a thrall. Never made a hive. And now your maker is dead.” He smiled as she reached down for him. “And you will never be a master draug.”

She paused, and just for a flicker of a second Claire saw terror in her face. “I rule here.”

“You are wrong,” he said. “The woman inside you has never surrendered to you, never fully allowed the draug control.” He held out his hand, and in it was the leather-wrapped handle of a silver knife. “And never will. Remember who you are, Amelie. Reject this. You have the power to kill her. Do it now.”